San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Learn about plants with psychoactive effects
Michael Pollan engages reader, mixing history with firsthand knowledge
Over the course of his sizable career, Michael Pollan has made a habit of using his books as a means of reintroducing readers to things we seemingly already know.
Be it our own gardens, the dinner table or the practice of cooking itself, Pollan’s insatiable appetite to learn every possible morsel about the subject on which he is writing is a gift that has proved itself with bestseller after bestseller. Graceful in his deployment of scientific jargon and willing to admit his own ignorance on the page, Pollan’s conversational yet authoritative tone has always served as a central asset of his work, but perhaps never more so than in his latest effort.
At a glance, “This Is Your Mind on Plants” is a book focused on three substances with psychoactive properties: caffeine, opium and mescaline. But far beyond providing a detailed, living history for each of these three compounds, Pollan takes things a bold step further by placing himself into a narrative that often demands he consume some himself.
It’s impossible to overstate the impact this choice makes on the text, which avoids the usual pitfalls of drugrelated academia by balancing historical context with some truly engaging stories from Pollan’s own past and present. In the book’s opening section, for instance, an explainer on opium’s sordid past as a chief export of the British East India Trading Co. quickly gives way to the lively tale of the time Pollan decided to grow opium poppies in his Berkeley backyard.
That saga — which originally ran in a 1997 issue of Harper’s but appears here with several previously omitted pages reinstated — provides a far more nuanced look into the dark heart of America’s drug war than a history of the plant alone could ever offer.
Seemingly aware of this conceit’s promise, Pollan successfully deploys twice more. In the book’s middle section, it is actually a selfimposed deprivation of caffeine on the author’s
By Michael Pollan (Penguin Press; 288 pages; $28)
part that provides the text’s central drama. Enlightening (and troubling) on several fronts, Pollan’s journey through caffeine abstinence eventually gives way to his final focus: mescaline.
Does Pollan try the stuff ? Absolutely. But in this case, it’s not his detailed accounts of time spent in an altered state of consciousness that offer the section’s most compelling fodder. It is Pollan’s noble attempt to understand why plants like peyote and the San Pedro cactus (both natural producers of mescaline) are so revered in certain cultures and, by extension, viewed by some as a sacrament not meant for outsiders to experience.
Anchored by a refreshing willingness to expose his own blind spots, Pollan’s latest work is an engrossing, plantpowered blend of general history, contemporary reporting and potent selfreflection.
By Savala Nolan
(Simon and Schuster; 208 pages; $22.99)